Today, computer-based systems are known which enable patients to receive medical care in their own home, rather than being admitted to a hospital. For instance, the Mandometer® system, comprising a portable computer connected to a scale, can be used to help patients with eating disorders to normalize their eating behaviour. During the course of a meal, the system displays continuous feedback to the patient regarding the consumed amount and eating speed.
However, in addition to this practical eating training, patients with eating disorders have a great need of mental support in order to break their pattern of destructive behaviour. Thus, these patients often have questions or issues that they want to discuss with a medical professional. Unfortunately, doctors are not available to answer questions around the clock, and in any case they tend to have limited time to deal with such questions. The patient's questions can also be complex to the degree that a team of specialists must be consulted, which is expensive and leads to a time delay before an answer can be provided.
Furthermore, patients with eating disorders have a tendency to go over the same questions over and over again, even though they have already received an answer. Such patients need help breaking their compulsive thought patterns.
The need to consult with a medical professional is not restricted to patients with eating disorders, but applies equally to patients suffering from any illness or symptoms showing compulsive thought patterns.
Furthermore, there is an ever increasing demand for generating personalized medical advice for a patient. Because of that demand there have been many different ways developed to do this, for instance medical expert systems are provided where a medical professional can enter a set of symptoms and receive suggestions for a diagnosis. Of course, today there are also virtual medical advisors directed toward patients, such as Internet based sites, for instance medical advice sites. Such sites are suitable for generating general medical advice, but normally suffer from drawbacks in that they are not adapted to the specific needs or characteristics of the patient.
Typically, prior art solutions do not provide medical advice tailored to an individual user with respect to the patient's history of interaction with the system, and his/her current mental state.
For example, in a known system, the patient accesses a web site and is presented with a series of predefined questions and answers. Based on the selected answers, the system then displays medical advice to the patient. In such systems, each patient accessing a certain site is shown the same response though they have different personal characteristics and interaction history. These systems are also limited in that they cannot depart from the predefined sequence of questions, and therefore there is a high risk that any specific question that the patient has cannot be answered, or that the response given is not appropriate, e.g. given the mental state of the patient. Some more sophisticated systems have the capability to change the response after a certain period of time.
Thus, according to our best knowledge, none of the existing techniques present a way suitable for providing personalized medical advice in a targeted way, or providing solutions to the situation described in the previous paragraph, providing a response that is tailored to the patient's current mental state and history of interaction with the system, although already existing infrastructure such as conventional medical treatment Internet sites could possibly support such techniques.
Eating disorders, in the form of anorexia and bulimia nervosa, pose a challenge to society, and gravely affect the lives of many young females.
In particular, though research has been performed over the last fifty years, eating disorders are still by many considered chronic disorders. A recent review of available treatments and bulimia nervosa showed that most conventional employed methods fail to provide any improvement for the patients.
Thus, there is certainly a need to solve also this particular problem.